One day in August 2019, Chen Yuanhui bent over a cage in a room in the Mangshan mountains to look at a young snake. Something dark came at his head from above, and he jumped back. It was a Mangshan pit viper that had escaped from its enclosure. Later he wrote on social media that he had escaped death one more time.
Those last words mean a lot. In more than thirty years of studying this snake, he has been bitten by snakes over twenty times. Nine of the bites came from the Mangshan pit viper itself, and two of them nearly killed him. He is 77 now, and he still researches and protects the species he discovered 37 years ago. In the small restaurants at the foot of Mangshan, you only have to say the words Snake Doctor, and everyone knows which white-haired man you mean.
It began with a patient. Chen was born in Guangdong and finished a clinical college in Hunan at nineteen, then worked at a snakebite research centre. When the centre closed in 1982, he did not take a job in a city. He went deep into the Mangshan mountains and worked there as a snakebite doctor. In 1984, at the hospital of the Mangshan forestry farm, he treated a forestry worker who had been bitten by a strange snake. Local people called it the little green dragon. The worker said it was yellow and green all over, with a white tail.
Chen knew the venomous snakes of the region well. King cobras are black. Bamboo pit vipers are green but small. The five-pacer is large but brown. None of them matched. He decided that this must be a species that nobody had described before.
Then he searched for five years. On every rest day he walked into the mountains. He met bears and he got lost, but he never thought about stopping. In 1989 he heard that a worker had caught a nest of twenty-three snakes that matched the description. He did not tell his wife, and he used the money the family had been saving for three years to buy a refrigerator. He bought the snakes.
He sent photographs to experts in the province, but black-and-white pictures proved nothing. So he carried two newly hatched baby snakes to Chengdu to show the zoologist Zhao Ermi. The babies were too small to prove anything either, so he went home, collected an adult snake and travelled to Chengdu again. In 1990 Zhao and Chen published a paper together. The animal was China’s fiftieth venomous snake species, and they named it the Mangshan pit viper.
Naming it was the easy part. At that time the forestry farm was telling people they could make money by killing snakes. Chen went to the county leaders and argued that protection had to come first and research second. After almost a year of discussions, the appeal he had written became an official government document. It stopped the trade in dead snakes and saved the species.
The snake is unusual. It hunts at night, can weigh three to five kilograms and can grow up to 203 centimetres long. It moves the white tip of its tail like a small worm to bring prey close enough to strike. Its venom can kill a person who gets no treatment. The female lays thirteen to twenty-one eggs and guards them until they hatch.
Chen also bred them. In 1994 the first young snakes were born in his care. By 2022 he had bred 160, and he released every one of them into the nature reserve on the mountain. In some years he lived on the mountain for half the year. Because the snakes are active at night, he slept outdoors and walked into the forest with a torch. Mangshan covers more than two hundred square kilometres, he said, and almost every part of it holds his footprints.
His family paid a price too. His wife almost divorced him because of the snakes. His daughter was so worried about him that for four years after finishing her studies she did not look for a job, so that she could go up the mountain with him. The family stayed in their small bungalow of 51 square metres, where he bred the vipers. When the snake became famous as an endangered animal, buyers reportedly offered more than a million yuan, about 150,000 US dollars, for one. Chen refused. After a snake dealer stole one from his pit, he moved his snakes into his own house.
The ninth bite came on 18 August 2003, from a young snake he was releasing. It bit the middle finger of his left hand. He knew how important the first three minutes are, but he used them to take photographs, because it was the first wild young snake he had ever found. He lost consciousness before he got off the mountain, and the swelling moved from his finger to his chest. His colleagues had already prepared his funeral speech. His family went on giving him medicine, and after three days and nights he woke up. He had lost half a finger.
By his own count, fewer than six hundred of these vipers are still alive. The protection team now has three or four people, but the work needs someone who is not afraid of hard living, of exhaustion, of death or of snakes, and who can accept the loneliness. Such a person is hard to find, he said, and he hopes to meet one while he is still alive.
One of his snakes is now a specimen in the National Zoological Museum of China, which he gave to them himself. This year the museum criticised a man who had let his two children play with it until it was damaged. Chen said he was heartbroken, and that he could not understand why an adult would let children treat such a precious specimen as a toy. “Children don’t understand, but adults should,” he said.